In healthy individuals, adaptation to left-shifting prisms has been shown to simulate the symptoms of hemispatial neglect, including a reduction in global processing that approximates the local bias observed in neglect patients. The current study tested whether leftward prism adaptation can more specifically enhance local processing abilities. In three experiments, the impact of local and global processing was assessed through tasks that measure susceptibility to illusions that are known to be driven by local or global contextual effects. Susceptibility to the rod-and-frame illusion – an illusion disproportionately driven by both local and global effects depending on frame size – was measured before and after adaptation to left- and right-shifting prisms. A significant increase in rod-and-frame susceptibility was found for the left-shifting prism group, suggesting that adaptation caused an increase in local processing effects. The results of a second experiment confirmed that leftward prism adaptation enhances local processing, as assessed with susceptibility to the simultaneous-tilt illusion. A final experiment employed a more specific measure of the global effect typically associated with the rod-andframe illusion, and found that although the global effect was somewhat diminished after leftward prism adaptation, the trend failed to reach significance (p = .078). Rightward prism adaptation had no significant effects on performance in any of the experiments. Combined, these findings indicate that leftward prism adaptation in healthy individuals can simulate the local processing bias of neglect patients primarily through an increased sensitivity to local visual cues, and confirm that prism adaptation not only modulates lateral shifts of attention, but also prompts shifts from one level of processing to another.

Examining the effect of prenatal testosterone and aggression on sporting choice and sporting longevity.

No abstract

The extent to which drivers’ attitudes toward the use of autonomous vehicle systems can be influenced by various driver factors (e.g., driver age, experience with the systems, etc.) has yet to be firmly established. To investigate driver perceptions and acceptance of advanced vehicle systems, the current research examined initial and repeated exposure to systems while driving under various commonly encountered on-road situations (e.g., emergency braking). Somewhat surprisingly, driver perceptions of safety when driving vehicles with assistive technologies diminished following repeated exposure to the technologies. However, when drivers were afforded more extensive experience, they reported a heightened appreciation of the systems—especially drivers who might benefit most from this assistance (e.g., distracted or older drivers).

Several studies have demonstrated a dissociation of the effects of illusion on perception and action, with perception generally reported to be susceptible to illusions, while actions are seemingly immune. These findings have been interpreted to support Milner and Goodale's Two Visual Systems model, which proposes the existence of separate visual processing streams for perception and action. However, an alternative interpretation suggests that this type of behavioral dissociation will occur for any illusion that is caused by a distortion of the observer's egocentric reference frame, without requiring the existence of separate perception and action systems that are differently affected by the illusion. In this scenario, movements aimed at illusory targets will be accurate if they are guided within the same distorted reference frame used for target encoding, since the error of motor guidance will cancel with the error of encoding (hence, for actions, two wrongs do make a right). We further test this Two-Wrongs model by examining two illusions for which the hypothesis makes very different predictions: the rod-and-frame illusion (which affects perception but not actions) and the simultaneous-tilt illusion (which affects perception and actions equally). We demonstrate that the rod-and-frame illusion is caused by a distortion of the observer's egocentric reference frame suitable for the cancellation of errors predicted by the Two-Wrongs model. In contrast, the simultaneous-tilt illusion is caused by local interactions between stimulus elements within an undistorted reference frame, precluding the cancellation of errors associated with the Two-Wrongs model such that the illusion is reflected in both perception and actions. These results provide evidence for a class of illusions that lead to dissociations of perception and action through distortions of the observer's spatial reference frame, rather than through the actions of functionally separate visual processing streams.